Maize and blue running behind in green energy plan at University of Michigan

The University of Michigan partnered with DTE Energy in 2012 to install solar panels on its North Campus. The project involve the installation of ground-based and pole-mounted solar panels, rated up to 600 kilowatts. It is one of a few examples of UM installing clean energy on its campus. (Ben Allan Smith | MLive.com)

ANN ARBOR, MI - After delivering an impassioned speech to the University of Michigan's Board of Regents asking for more serious follow-through on reducing the campus' greenhouse gas emissions, Adam Simon caught the room's attention when asked by a board member which peer institutions were leading the way toward carbon neutrality.

"It's the university that's beaten us in football 13 out of the last 14 years - Ohio State," Simon said in May, citing the university's status as the Big Ten's largest green power user, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. "Ohio State is recognized globally as the leader in implementing sustainability on their campus."

Simon, a professor in UM's Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, has been a sustainability watchdog of sorts at the university, working with students, faculty, other universities and private energy companies to better understand how UM can improve its progress toward reducing its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

In 2011, UM President Mary Sue Coleman set what was considered an ambitious goal, Simon said, of reducing Scope 1 and 2 GHG emissions 25 percent on its campus by 2025. Progress toward that goal has been hard to come by, though, as the university approaches the midway point of its target with just 5.6 percent emission reductions since its 2006 baseline.

UM has instituted some measures that will help it approach that goal, including approving an $80 million expansion of its Central Power Plant in hopes of reducing GHG emissions by 80,000 metric tons per year. That would put it approximately half way to its emissions reduction goal when the project is expected to be completed in 2021.

One of the biggest obstacles preventing more significant reductions in its carbon footprint is that the Ann Arbor campus continues to grow, UM Office of Campus Sustainability Director Andy Berki said.

In 2004, UM reported owning buildings totaling 26.85 million square feet. That number grew to 33.56 million by 2011 and has increased to approximately 37 million square feet currently, Berki said, giving the Ann Arbor campus approximately 28 percent more building square footage than it had 14 years ago.

"I would say one of our largest challenges is the size of our campus and our continued growth," he said. "We have roughly 37 million square feet of infrastructure, and much of that space is energy-intensive space. That includes one of the largest health care structures in the country. It's critical to the mission of the institution, but it's also a challenge for us from a greenhouse gas standpoint."

From suggestions to convert its largest parking lots to solar-powered carports to using geothermal energy to heat its campus buildings, sustainability advocates like Simon and students who formed the Clean Wolverines sustainability group are part of a growing number of voices pushing UM to increase its urgency toward carbon neutrality and energy reduction efforts.

Here's a look at what UM is doing to address reducing its greenhouse gas emissions, what others would like to see done, how other universities have tackled the issue on their campuses and UM's relationship with the city of Ann Arbor as it relates to sustainability.

Raising concerns

The University of Michigan is in the process of pursuing LEED Silver certification for its new 300,000 square foot Biological Sciences Building, which is expected to open this fall. Some in the university community believe UM's LEED Silver requirement for construction projects over $10 million is not aggressive enough. (Ben Allan Smith | MLive.com)

Raising concerns

While UM has found progress toward its 25 percent GHG reduction goal, Simon, UM students and alumni also believe the university has fallen behind its peers by not modifying its goals to reflect advances in green power production.

He fears there is not enough influence among top decision-makers to lead UM toward carbon neutrality - a goal other universities like the University of California, Cornell University, the University of Florida and Clemson University have instituted.

"Since 2011, peer institutions around the world have adopted goals of carbon neutrality and our peer institutions are making much faster progress toward achieving their sustainability goals than we are," Simon told the regents.

"We should have a net-zero emissions policy," he later added in an interview with The Ann Arbor News. "Every new building that is proposed - architecture, engineering and construction - you have to design that building so that it exists without producing any emissions. That's the policy at other universities."

"While meeting the current goal will require continued effort, this goal lags those of many peer institutions," the report states. "... If UM wishes to remain a leader in this area as a broad range of the University's stakeholders desire, a significantly more ambitious target is needed than was called for in 2011."

It's not that UM has stood pat in looking for ways to address energy efficiency in its campus buildings, Simon said. While UM has become more energy efficient, it faces challenges with the addition of new buildings and square footage it occupies across Ann Arbor.

According to statistics from UM's Office of Campus Sustainability, the university produced 643,932 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2017. Without efficiency upgrades implemented since 2011, that total would be closer to 880,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. Regardless, the total remains well above UM's goal of reducing emissions to 510,000 metric tons by 2025.

As an example, Berki said UM's 1.1 million square-foot C.S. Mott Children's Hospital was opened after the university's 2006 emissions reduction baseline, adding 30,000 metric tons of carbon to the university's footprint.

"... But it obviously supports our mission and treats thousands of children every year, so there are trade-offs to everything," Berki said. "That's probably the largest challenge we have as an institution - our size, our growth and the type of energy intensive space we have on our campus."

Several significant construction projects, including the recently completed Stephen M. Ross Athletic Campus Athletics South Competition and Performance project, the nearly-complete Biological Sciences Building and the Ford Robotics Laboratory, which recently broke ground, are in the process of pursuing LEED Silver certification. In 2017, the university completed two projects - the $135 million Stephen M. Ross School of Business renovation and A. Alfred Taubman Wing project - that received LEED Gold certification.

The addition of these large buildings can be expensive from an energy cost standpoint. The nearly 280,000 square feet of new athletics facilities space, particularly the new South Competition and Performance Project, resulted in facilities expenses increasing by $573,000 in 2018 for the UM Athletics Department and is expected to increase another $886,000 in 2019.

Beyond LEED Silver standards, Berki said UM currently requires that all new buildings are built with the most energy-efficient standards according to its master design guidelines. The university approaches new building construction from an energy standpoint in two ways.

"All new buildings and new renovations projects have to adhere to the most energy efficient standards that are available from the envelope on in to the wiring of the facility," Berki said. "The second way we approach energy conservation is we have a formal energy management team that goes through our existing facilities that aren't under any kind of renovation or new construction process and we look at ways to tune our buildings and make them more efficient than they are currently. Those efforts have proven to be successful in the past 15 years."

Not aggressive enough

The University of Michigan's South Hall is one of 12 buildings on campus to receive LEED Gold certification. Some in the university community believe UM's standards that all new construction and renovation projects above $10 million be LEED Silver certified is not ambitious enough given the campus' continued growth. (Ben Allan Smith | MLive.com)

Not aggressive enough

While those measures have helped keep emissions down with UM's growth, the university's long-term targets and current standards aren't aggressive enough in the eyes of some.

John Mirsky, a member of the City of Ann Arbor's Energy Commission and the city administrator's executive policy advisor for sustainability, said only setting an intermediate target of 2025 has left UM behind other Big Ten universities and peer institutions nationally. Comparatively, the City of Ann Arbor has a 90 percent community-wide greenhouse gas reduction target by 2050.

"...As a result, UM has not aligned its resources and policies with longer-term GHG reduction targets that will likely have to be set," Mirsky said. "That includes spending more money now on renewable energy contracts and energy-efficiency measures as well as on capital projects in order to save money in the long run as fossil fuel energy prices rise."

Mirsky and Simon noted that UM's LEED Silver construction requirement is a "very low standard" for new buildings with a 50-plus year life span and was critical of the university's commitment to only reducing "Scope 1 and 2" emissions, which account for Scope 3 emissions, Mirsky said, include emissions arising from traveling commutes of students, faculty, staff, health system employees and patients, spectators and visitors. Scope 1 and 2 emissions, on the other hand, are related to owned sources of energy use and purchased sources of energy, respectively.

Others see UM lagging in its targets, which rank toward the bottom of the Big Ten in reducing carbon emissions, according to data collected by Simon.

Of the 14 Big Ten universities, UM ranks ahead of only Iowa in its 25 percent emission reduction goal, while Purdue University, Rutgers University and the University of Nebraska do not currently have goals.

Ohio State, Northwestern, the University of Minnesota, the University of Maryland and the University of Illinois, on the other hand, have 100 percent reduction goal by 2050, while Michigan State University has plans to reduce emissions by 65 percent by 2030.

Planet Blue's plan

UM has helped reduce waste generated on campus by hosting a zero-waste events. Photo provided l University of Michigan

In some areas, UM's Planet Blue - the sum of work being done by UM students, faculty and staff across the university to meet the global challenges of sustainability - has been up to the challenge. It already surpassed its 2025 goal of reducing chemical applications to campus landscapes by 40 percent - reducing applications in 2017 by 43 percent - largely by switching to organic fertilizer rather than synthetic fertilizers.

"We were applying somewhere in the range of 40,000 pounds of chemicals (per year)," Berki said. "That has dropped to a little over 20,000 pounds chemically."

While the university doesn't have a specific target for reducing Scope 3 emissions as Mirsky noted, UM is halfway toward its goal of reducing its 2025 target of reducing vehicle carbon output per passenger trip by 30 percent below 2006 levels.

UM's sustainability performance received a gold rating by the international Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System in 2015. It was one of 80 institutions earning a gold rating, and among more than 700 colleges and universities around the globe using the STARS reporting tool.

STARS uses a self-reporting framework to benchmark sustainability efforts in the areas of academics, engagement, operations, planning and administration and innovation. Through these efforts, UM has helped reduce waste generated on campus by hosting a zero-waste events. The Office of Campus Sustainability provides guidance and assistance in creating the events, where 90 percent of waste is diverted from the landfill through recycling and composting.

Those initiatives haven't resulted in substantial progress toward the university's waste prevention goals, however, including reducing the amount of waste sent to landfills. UM set a goal of reducing that total by 40 percent below 2006 levels by 2025, but has only reduced it by 3 percent through 2017.

Berki said he and others at UM realize more work needs to be done to reach its sustainability goals by 2025. The university has made efforts to reduce GHG emissions through creating better energy efficiency in existing buildings, with a team of engineers going through buildings looking for solutions that make both good business sense and reduce the university's carbon footprint.

The sun sets on wind turbines south of Breckenridge in northeast Gratiot County's Emerson Township. UM currently is pursuing options of purchasing clean energy from wind or solar powers from farms in the state of Michigan. Jeff Schrier | MLive.com

Searching for green energy options

UM will need to think big - and likely outside of campus - to make a more significant reduction in its carbon footprint, Berki noted.

"We understand we're going to need to probably invest in renewable energy in our portfolio, either through wind power or solar power in order to achieve our goal," Berki said. "We are actively engaged in conversations on how to do that."

UM currently generates roughly 50 percent of its utility needs through its natural gas co-generation plant on campus, while purchasing the other 50 percent from DTE.

Historically, around 70 percent of DTE's profile has been from coal burning power plants, which presents challenges in how much it can reduce what are called Scope 2 emissions, or emissions from the consumption of purchased electricity.

In the future, Berki said he expects DTE to invest in more green energy options, which will in turn help the university reduce its own emission reduction goals.

"The University of Michigan will benefit from that greatly as DTE shuts down coal plants and turns them over to gas plants," he said. "At the same time they're doing that, they're also developing more renewable energy in the state of Michigan."

UM has reduced its carbon footprint through the purchase of Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) from two 2.5 megawatt turbines near Cadillac at a cost of $3 million, resulting in an annual reduction of 3,500 metric tons. UM's 2015 energy report noted it could invest in RECs to the tune of $5.8 million for each additional 1 percent reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

While other universities like Ohio State have done just that - purchasing RECs from wind and solar farms miles away to offset their on-campus emissions - Berki said UM is more interested in keeping its green investments local.

"I think we're more interested in seeing the development and procurement of actual wind energy and solar energy being built on the grid than pursuing RECs as an option," Berki said.